NTOSKernel.exe file is missing or corrupt NTOSKrnl.exe file is missing

Yesterday one of my colleagues came to me and said her machine got crashed and it’s not booting. It was an XP machine and before coming to me the guy who assists me for my work already tried it booting in safe mode or last known good configuration mode but nothing was working.

Please remember my suggested solution is useful for you if you have two windows XP machine.

My assistance asked me if we should go for rebuild of this machine. My straight answer was no because I wanted to see if we can have other option.

First I checked machine and In next step I asked my assistance to do a simple trick. We copied ntoskernel.exe file from some other computer’s \windows\system32 folder and we pasted that ntoskernel.exe file in damaged machine’s \windows\system32 folder. For this task we made the crashed machine hard disk as secondary hard disk .

Here is the complete procedure for this.1) Take out the crashed windows XP machine hard disk2) Make it secondary hard disk in your another Windows XP machine.3) Copy ntoskernel.exe file in secondry harddisk rootdrive:\windows\system32 folder from your rootdrive:\windows\system32 folder.4) Remove secondary hard disk and attach it in its original machine.5) Try to boot your computer now. It should get booted without any issue.

Do remember both the windows XP version should be same. There are other options also but those are not this much user friendly and if you do not have two computers why don’t you visit your friends place for a cup of coffee with your hard disk.